If you are fairly new to Twitter you could be forgiven for being unaware of its search function. Bizarrely, the link to the search area is placed at the bottom of the page with all the legal and development stuff.
WebProNews is reporting (link removed) that Twitter has started to beta test its search and trends functions on the home page of some its (logged in) users.
So what is Twitter search?
Twitter search allows you to “see what’s happening – right now“. If you enter a term into the search area it will display a list of recent tweets which include the word or phrase you have entered, but, and this is the interesting bit, if you don’t really want to look for anything in particular, but do want to know what the hot topics are, Twitter kindly provides a list of the current top ten “trending topics” underneath the search button.
This type of real time search has not been accomplished by any other website, not even Google, and it is giving Twitter a massive boost.
Famously, the recent earthquake in China and the airplane landing on the Hudson River were both news items which broke on Twitter – even beating massive news corporations such as CNN etc.
Another feature of Twitter search is the ability to create an RSS feed from any word or phrase you wish to monitor. Add this RSS feed to your reader and you don’t have to keep visiting Twitter to monitor what is being said about your favourite subjects (or yourself!). It is possible to do the same for Google’s News search, but the main advantage of Twitter search is the immediacy of it.
